Social Research on Services and Service Work in Germany — from the ‘Service Gap’ to Service Professionalism

German social science research on the organization and performance of service work has been influenced by contradictory impulses. Although Germany was among the first countries, alongside Finland and Denmark, to provide significant public funding for research on innovation in services, there is a long and persistent tradition of skep- ticism about the overall importance of services for national economic performance. It was a German chancellor, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, speaking to Opel workers in Bochum on August 15, 2002, who remarked scornfully, ‘We cannot make a living by giving each other haircuts.’ When he said this, more than two-thirds of the gross domestic product was being generated by services, but Schröder had limited sympathy and understanding for the increasing relevance of services to modern economies. Debates about problems of advancing tertiarization had then reached a peak in Germany, and the remarks of European commissioner of the internal market, Frits Bolkestein, that ‘either the future of Europe lies in services or it will have no future’ (FAZ, November 2, 2002), were still recent. The turn to services was reflected in the development and implementation of the so-called Bolkestein Directive (European Commission, 2004), which set the goal of reducing restrictions on cross-border trade in services among member states.